Victor Bonham-Carter

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Biographical Information

Victor Bonham-Carter, who died in 2007 "on March 13 aged 93, enjoyed a varied career as an author, farmer and publisher; his principal interests lay in the countryside and military history, but he also spent a significant part of his life helping his fellow writers.

"In 1963 Bonham-Carter joined the Society of Authors, of which he was joint-secretary from 1971 to 1978... Bonham-Carter also served his fellow authors as secretary of the Royal Literary Fund from 1966 to 1982... From 1947 to 1959 he ran a mixed farm in Somerset. He was also invited, in 1951, to become the historian of the Dartington Hall estate, in Devon, established in the 1930s as a social experiment in resuscitating a rural community. His work there led to his book Dartington Hall, written with WB Curry and published in 1958.

"Bonham-Carter wrote a number of books about rural matters, including The English Village (1952), a historical survey of the village up to the modern era; Exploring Parish Churches (1959), described by The Daily Telegraph as "a masterly survey of the whole evolution of the parish church"; Farming the Land (1959), a textbook for secondary school children; The Survival of the English Countryside (1971), an analysis of the historical changes in land use which addressed what would now be described as "environmental" issues; Exmoor Writers (1987); and The Essence of Exmoor (1991).

"In 1969 Bonham-Carter (who was president of the Exmoor Society from 1975) started a publishing company at Dulverton called Exmoor Press, which produced 50-page booklets, each written by an expert about life on the moor and some of which remain in print. He sold the business in 1989... He married first, in 1938, Audrey Stogdon, with whom he had two sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1979, and that year he married secondly Cynthia Sanford, who survives him."

Affiliations

• Former chairman of the Soil Association's Editorial Board and a Council member in the early 1970s